Introducing Private Communities in Zoho Discussions

For over an year, Zoho Discussions has been helping businesses and non-profit organizations create and foster communities that involve and empower its members and help crowd-source decision making.

One of the design goals of Zoho Discussions was to reduce the amount of technical expertise administrators needed to setup and maintain an user community. But one of the things we’ve heard loud and clear is that many of our customers did not find the initial setup process as easy as they’d like it to be. The main reason was that Zoho Discussions setup management had so many options and controls that it took some time to get used to.

We also realized that our customer base was broadly split into two main segments – those who wanted to setup a private community (for improving employee engagement, supporting private beta launches etc) and those who wanted to set up a public customer support community.

Based on the feedback and customer profile segmentation, we have improved our sign-up and community-creation process focusing on streamlining two key scenarios: private communities and public customer support. When you sign-up for Zoho Discussions, we make it easier for you to quickly get started with one of those two options, and we quietly set on the background a number of parameters you previously had to deal with yourself manually.

This segmentation runs deeper into Zoho Discussions than just settings changes. For instance, you can get a fully powered PRIVATE community for Free – as opposed to paying hundreds of dollars a month for “enterprise plans” of other similar products.

We have also introduced a new getting-started walk-through guide that takes you through the most common settings.

Currently, we also offer a free, no-commitment consultation and implementation support. If you want to explore the feasibility of rolling out Zoho Discussions for your business / project, do get in touch with us.